Analog SFF, March 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "What?"

  "It's a room full of metal spheres, about as tall as I am. They started making noises in the early twentieth century—"

  "Those like me remembered them all,” Fly-in-Amber said, “though they were just noises at first."

  "—and we knew the signals were from Earth, because we only got them when Earth was in the sky. Then the spheres started showing pictures in mid-century, which gave us visual clues for decoding human language. Then when the cube was developed, they started displaying in three dimensions."

  "Always been there ... how long is ‘always'?” Howard Jain asked. “How far back does your history go?"

  "We don't have history in your sense,” Fly-in-Amber said. “Your history is a record of conflict and change. We have neither, in the normal course of things. A meteorite damaged an outlying area of our home 4,359 ares ago. Otherwise, not much has happened until your radio started talking."

  "You have explored more of Mars than we have,” Robin Hood said, “with your satellites and rovers, and much of what we know about the planet, we got from you. You put your base in this area because of the large frozen lake underground; we assume that's why we were put here, too. But that memory is long gone."

  "Some of us have a theory,” Red said, “that the memory was somehow suppressed, deliberately erased. What you don't know you can't tell."

  "You can't erase a memory,” Fly-in-Amber said.

  "We can't. The ones who put us here obviously could do many things we can't do."

  "You are not a memory expert. I am."

  Red's complexion changed slightly, darkening. It probably wasn't the first time they'd had this argument. “One thing I do remember is the 1950s, when television started."

  "You're that old!” Jain said.

  "Yes, though I was young then. That was during the war between Russia and the United States, the Cold War."

  "You have told us this tale before,” Robin Hood said. “Not all of us agree."

  Red pushed on. “The United States had an electronic network it called the ‘Distant Early Warning System,’ set up so they would know ahead of time if Russian bombers were on their way.” He paused. “I think that's what we are."

  "Warning whom?” Jain said.

  "Whoever put us here. We call them the Others. We're on Mars instead of Earth because the Others didn't want you to know about us until you had space flight."

  "Until we posed a threat to them,” Dad said.

  "That's a very human thought.” Red paused. “Not to be insulting. But it could also be that they didn't want to influence your development too early. Or it could be that there was no profit in contacting you until you had evolved to this point."

  "We wouldn't be any threat to them," Jain said. “If they could come here and set up the underground city we saw, thousands and thousands of years ago, light years from home, it's hard to imagine what they could do now. What they could do to us."

  The uncomfortable silence was broken by Maria Rodriguez, who came down from the quarantine area. “They're done now. It looks like all the kids are okay.” She looked around at all the serious faces. “I said they're okay. Crisis over."

  Actually, it had just begun.

  * * * *

  8. Ambassador

  Which is how I would become an ambassador to the Martians. Everybody knows they didn't evolve on Mars, but what else are you going to call them?

  Red, whose real name is Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader, suggested that I would be a natural choice as a go-between. I was the first human to meet them, and the fact that they risked exposure by saving my life would help humans accept their good intentions.

  On Earth, there was a crash program to orbit a space station, Little Mars, that duplicated the living conditions they were used to. Before my five-year residence on Mars was over, I would be sent back there with Red and Green, along with four friends, who would be coordinating research, and Dargo Solingen, I guess because she was the only bureaucrat available on Mars.

  Nobody wanted to bring the Martians all the way down to Earth quite yet. A worldwide epidemic of the lung crap wouldn't improve relations, and nobody could say whether they might harbor something even more unpleasant.

  So as well as an ambassador, I became sort of a lab animal, under quarantine and constant medical monitoring, maybe for life. But I'm also the main human sidekick for Red and Green. Leaders come up from Earth to make symbolic gestures of friendship, even though it's obviously more about fear than brotherhood. When the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.

  We thought that would be be decades or centuries or even millennia—unless they had figured a way around the speed-of-light speed limit.

  Or unless they were closer.

  To be concluded.

  Copyright (c) 2007 by Joe Haldeman

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton

  Axis, Robert Charles Wilson, Tor, $25.95, 303 pp. (ISBN: 0-7653-0939-4).

  Empyre, Josh Conviser, Del Rey, $13.95, 277 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-345-48503-8).

  The Third Lynx, Timothy Zahn, Tor, $24.95, 351 pp. (ISBN: 0-7653-1732-X).

  The Mirror of Worlds, David Drake, Tor, $25.95, 333 pp. (ISBN: 0-7653-1260-3).

  Slan Hunter, A. E. Van Vogt and Kevin J. Anderson, Tor, $24.95, 270 pp. (ISBN: 0-7653-1675-7).

  Making Money, Terry Pratchett, HarperCollins, $25.95, 393 pp. (ISBN: 0-06-116164-0).

  The Metatemporal Detective, Michael Moorcock, Pyr, $25.00, 327 pp. (ISBN: 978-1-59102-596-2).

  The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, Bruce McAllister, Golden Gryphon Press, $24.95, 308 + xii pp. (ISBN: 978-1-930846-49-4).

  Finding Magic, Tanya Huff, ISFiC Press, $30.00, 312 pp. (ISBN: 978-0-9759156-4-3).

  * * * *

  Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo-winning Spin began with the premise that one night the stars went out and satellites fell out of the sky. A barrier had been erected around the Earth, presumably by aliens, whom folks soon agreed to call the Hypotheticals. In due time, folks learned that time outside the barrier was passing much, much faster than at home, and when they learned to get past it, they terraformed and colonized Mars and watched a new civilization grow in just a couple of subjective years. In due time, the barrier came down, Martians arrived on Earth bearing alarming technology derived from Hypothetical leavings, and an immense archway appeared in the Indian Ocean, through which one could sail a ship to a new world.

  The sequel, Axis, is set on that new world, which Earth's industrial emissaries are busily stripping of oil, timber, and other resources. But that's not the story. The Martians’ alarming technology included a means of extending human lifespan an extra 30-40 years; those who accept it are called Fourths, and they are persecuted by the Department of Genomic Security. Less well known is something that, when implanted in a human fetus, attunes the later child to the Hypotheticals. It was designed by scientists who hoped to devise a way to communicate with the aliens, and it didn't work on Mars. The axis of the tale is a debate over whether such communication is even possible. Are the Hypotheticals beings or mere process? Are they people with whom one might converse? Or are they the mindless result of Darwinian selection acting on self-reproducing machines? Do they have will and intention and purpose?

  Now meet Isaac. He looks like a 12-year-old kid, but he has a strange ability to tell where West is and a yearning to go in that direction, toward the Rub al-Khali desert, which has lately been shaken by earthquakes. He's also been raised by a strange community of Fourths, led by Dr. Avram Dvali, to which a strange visitor, Sulean Moi, has just come. She came to meet Isaac, she tells him. And Hypothetical ashes fall from the sky like cometary dust, blocking roads, collapsing roofs, and sprouting weird life forms such as ocular roses.

  Now meet Lise Adams, whose ex-husband works for Genomic Security. He's just a bureaucrat, not a persecutor. She is hunting for information about the father who disappeared wh
en she was young. One of his friends was Avram Dvali, and she is hunting for him with the aid of a disreputable bush pilot, Turk Findley. Meanwhile, agents of Genomic Security—not bureaucrats!—are asking questions, and when a Fourth friend of Turk goes missing, Lise's ex learns that he has been killed.

  No one but Isaac suspects that big things are stirring in the Rub al-Khali, but soon Lise, Turk, Sulean, Dvali and the Fourth community, and of course Isaac, are fleeing Genomic Security in that direction. Experienced readers will be expecting apotheosis for Isaac and great revelations about the Hypotheticals, and they won't be disappointed (though they won't get quite what they hope for).

  I won't be a bit surprised if this one cops a Hugo too.

  * * * *

  In Echelon, Josh Conviser supposed a U.S. government program to control the world by surveillance and by spotting and either co-opting or blocking new technological innovations. When Ryan Laing, once dead but revived with an infusion of nanotech “drones,” and his operator, Sarah Peters, a gifted info-searcher and recognizer of patterns, discovered the conspiracy behind it all, it crashed. Its successor was Empyre, which used pinpoint terrorist attacks to tip nations and regions in directions favorable to U.S. interests. Nasty work, especially when Sarah is loaded with weaponized Ebola virus (without her knowledge) and used to unleash plague. Yet the agenda behind the virus is not that of Empyre, but of a mad genius, forged and honed by Echelon and Empyre, who thinks humanity needs a master. It's up to Ryan and Sarah to evade capture and death, to struggle with love and hate for each other, and to do their damnedest to end the threat to the world.

  Empyre holds together much better than its predecessor, but there is a fundamental waitaminnit flaw. When Sarah is remotely triggered to shed virus, people instantly—within seconds—start dying very messily. No incubation period is necessary. Real viruses take time to show their effects; real Ebola takes 3-21 days. There is no such thing as an “instant” virus, nor is one possible since the small number of virus particles one acquires on exposure needs time to multiply to a level than can have effect. Granted that an instant virus is a gimmick that gives the plot a useful urgency, it is nonsense, and the kind of nonsense that makes a reader want to pitch the book across the room.

  The plot hums right along, but the nonsense level says, “Skip it."

  * * * *

  Timothy Zahn's sequel to Night Train to Rigel, The Third Lynx, is good fun. You may recall that Rigel involved interstellar passenger trains (run by the robotic Spiders) and a species of symbiotic coral, the telepathic group-mind known as the Modhri, created as a super-weapon by a long-extinct alien species and now bent on ruling the galaxy. Both elements are still here, unified by the race to find stolen sculptures dug up on a distant world. They aren't hugely valuable in and of themselves, but the curiosity value of the nine items, three each of lynxes, vipers, and hawks, has made them collectable. Unfortunately, all but one lynx have been burgled from their museums and collections by persons unknown.

  Hero Frank Compton and Spider-linked Bayta are aboard the Quadrail when a stranger approaches, asking for help in buying an unnamed artwork. Soon the stranger is dead, he turns out to be a famous trillionaire, the artwork is the third Lynx, and the symbiotic Modhri, through its colonized “walkers,” is clearly after it. It may have the other eight as well, though when Compton visits a museum that lost a viper, the viper turns out to have blown up.

  Explosive sculptures? Aliens bent on galactic domination hunting eagerly for them? Clearly there is more here than meets the eye and it is very important to keep the sculptures out of Modhri-controlled hands. But Compton is dogged by a Terran intelligent agent who wants him arrested for murder. Life is also complicated by the hunt for the trillionaire's missing protégé, who may have the missing lynx in his keeping, and by Compton's strange romantic interest in the protégé's fiancée.

  Needless to say, Zahn pulls all the pieces together and even provides at the end a fascinating hook on which to hang the next book in the series.

  * * * *

  It's easy to see why David Drake's Lord of the Isles series is popular. If you have any taste at all for heroic fantasy, you'll love it.

  The Mirror of Worlds is the second volume of his Crown of the Isles trilogy, which will conclude the series. The setting is a world wracked by the Change, which threw together patches of landscape from countless eras, complete with buildings and peoples, including the predatory cat-folk, the Coerli. The kingdom of the Isles has become a continent whose hope of peace rests with Prince Garric and his friends, once ordinary folk of the countryside in Haft, who are now struggling to bring humans and Coerli into a single folk when mysterious warriors start emerging from sacred pools when a strange star is high in the sky. They can be stopped by covering the pools, but not all pools are within reach. The Warriors, known as the Last, apparently come from far in the future when they have overrun the world and destroyed all that is human. Now they are here, and they threaten all. Can they be stopped?

  The wizard Tenoctris goes seeking power and answers. Ilna, hunting Coerli to avenge past losses, finds an apparent survivor of a Coerli raid lying in a temple as if he were a fallen statue; answering just to “Temple,” he will play a crucial role. Shin, an aegipan (we would call him a faun), appears to invite a human champion to trek to visit the legendary Yellow King; if he makes it, the Yellow King will help. Prince Garric agrees to go and soon acquires as a steed the ogress Kore, who made the mistake of breaking into a stable and dining on his horse. Garric's sister Sharina will be his regent, while her love Cashel assists Tenoctris in her perilous quests. A Coerli wizard, Rasile, serves Sharina as advisor while Tenoctris is away.

  Drake's characters are appealing. He maintains momentum very well as he alternates among the various lines of the tale, bringing them steadily closer to the moment when they will join and together confront the threat of the Last. Reader interest stays high even though who wins is predictable, as is Drake's ushering from the wings the event that will motivate the next book.

  The middle book of the last trilogy in a long-running series is not the best place to begin the series. But that's what I did, and Drake makes me want to read all the rest!

  * * * *

  A. E. Van Vogt's Slan has been called a classic for a long time. When it first appeared in 1940, it resonated with SF fans. They were geeky misfits who felt superior to the rest of the world—the mundanes—but were nonetheless looked down upon. Van Vogt assured them of their superiority, and even today many fans call themselves slans. The original slans were smarter, stronger, healthier mutants who came equipped with golden tendrils dangling from the backs of their heads, which gave them telepathic powers. They could be spotted and slaughtered. There were also tendrilless slans that could fit in more easily. In a parallel with developments in pop culture, which has seen SF merge with film, TV, games, and mainstream fiction to the point where it can be hard to tell fans from mundanes, the tendrilless slans infiltrated society and took control of the media. They also plotted a sneak attack from their secret base on Mars, aiming to exterminate both true slans and humans and take over everything.

  That's the theme of Slan Hunter, written by Kevin J. Anderson from materials left behind by Van Vogt. Jommy Cross, hero of the earlier book, is here again, but before we see him in action we must witness the persecution by the secret police (led by a classic mustachio-twirling villain, John Petty) of a human couple with a slan baby, the fall of secret slan and president of Earth, Kier Gray, to a secret police coup, and the villain's sneer's at Jommy's warning of a tendrilless attack from Mars. Jommy and Gray, along with Jommy's sweetheart and Gray's daughter Kathleen, are locked in cells deep beneath the palace. And that, of course, is precisely when the attack arrives and all Earth's defenses are shattered.

  There's an awful lot of chestnuts in the fire, but that was Van Vogt's specialty, and his heroes never failed to pull them out before they were more than singed. So we know what Jommy must do, and we have faith
that he will manage, even if there must be a massive deus ex machina at the end. So Slan Hunter successfully fits the classic mold. Unfortunately, that mold was broken a long time ago. The best adjective Anderson can earn today is “quaint,” partly because he is obliged to be consistent with the technology of the original (remember carbon paper? Anderson's improvised justification does not convince).

  If you share Anderson's love for the classic, or if you worship Van Vogt's memory the way his family does, you will enjoy Slan Hunter. Otherwise, you will not be impressed.

  * * * *

  Terry Pratchett's Discworld series goes on and on, and the readers keep lapping them up with just as much reason as ever they did the works of the late P. G. Wodehouse, the equally British writer who invented Jeeves and may well have been an inspiration to Pratchett once upon a time. Pratchett has a tendency to tackle larger issues—such as labor and economics—but there is the same sort of British wit, the same fun to be had at the expense of upper-class nits, and a very similar sly mockery of convention. There is also considerable respect for feckless rogues such as Moist von Lipwig, who as Albert Spangler amassed a considerable stash by selling cheap diamonds (glass, really) to the gullible, among other cons. Albert's career ended on the gallows, but fortunately the Tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari, had a use for him, as recorded in Going Postal wherein Moist was induced to put the Post Office into more functional shape. He did such a fine job of it that now Lord Vetinari has another job for him: straightening out the Royal Bank.

  As Making Money opens, Moist is bored. He craves excitement so much that he has taken up Extreme Sneezing, as well as picking his own locks. But he's smart enough to turn down the job, until sweet old Topsy Lavish, the bank manager, dies and leaves her half interest in the bank to her dog, and the dog to Moist, with certain requirements to be observed, or else.

  The poor fellow's not bored anymore, not with Lavish kin gunning for him, an enamored golem jealous of his girlfriend, a mad scientist (and Igor) in the basement tending a fluidic device that models and sometimes controls the local economy, and an idea that a bank does not really need gold. Building on the success of his stamps, he invents paper money and proposes the gold standard be replaced with a labor standard. And it all works well enough that in due time, Lord Vetinari is mulling his next assignment (it's inevitable, you know, and the book is sure to be called Death and Taxes).